1998-12-11 Jerusalem Biblical Zoo |
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By Donald H. Harrison San Diego, CA (special) -- Determined to help reestablish four biblical animals in the wilds of the Golan and the Negev, Gabi Eshkar, chief veterinarian of Jerusalem's Biblical Zoo, recently spent two weeks visiting the San Diego Zoo and the San Diego Wild Animal Park to compare notes and to review techniques. The Israeli veterinarian expects to adapt many of the techniques utilized by the Wild Animal Park in breeding the endangered California Condor to his own zoo's campaign to breed the Griffin Vulture--the largest bird of the Middle East.Other endangered species which will be bred at the Biblical Zoo in Jerusalem and eventually released into the wild are the Arabian Oryx, Persian Fallow Deer, and Wild Ass. At a University Club breakfast meeting prior to driving to the Wild Animal Park, Eshkar met with the executive board of the San Diego Young Leadership Group of the Friends of the Jerusalem Foundation. The San Diego Young Leadership Group, chaired by Robert Price, is the chief financial backer of a section of the Biblical Zoo known as the "Biblelands Preserve." This preserve will be home to the four endangered species as well as other animals referred to in Hebrew Scriptures. On a pedestrian bridge overlooking the preserve, signs in Hebrew, Arabic and English identify not only the animals by name but also by the passages in the Bible that mentions them.
When the government of the Shah of Iran was collapsing 20 years ago, Israelis leaving the country took on the plane with them "five boxes of Persian Fallow Deer." They brought the animals to Israel, "started to breed them, and we now have the biggest population of this animal in the world," Eshkar said. "There are almost 200 of them." At the Biblelands Preserve, "we will have a big group of them--20 or 30- which we will breed for the next 10 years and all the babies will go into the wild," Eshkar said. "So we are going to release in the next 10 years between 500 and 600 animals in the wild until this population is stabilized.
Earlier this year, a farmer in the Golan Heights was responsible for killing more than 20 of the estimated 150 Griffin Vultures in the area. Wanting to fight the wolves which were attacking his herds, the farmer "put out a dead cow with a lot of poison out," Eshkar said. "A dead cow is good food for these birds of prey but not for wolves. Wolves don't eat (already) dead meat. He didn't kill one wolf, but he killed nearly 25 percent of the population of Griffin Vultures."
"For us it is very important because each time that we can have a healthy chick raised by its own species of Griffin Vulture--no matter that it is by two males--we get another chick to the wild." Whenever the Biblical Zoo releases a bird to the wild, it does so with a little ceremony. Two years ago, the Zoo gave the name of "Freedom" to a Griffin Vulture headed for release, and asked the mother of Israeli navigator Ron Arad to release the bird. Arad was captured in Lebanon 12 years ago, and is believed to be held prisoner by either Syrian or Iranian forces. A satellite collar was placed on the vulture, Eshkar said, "so we could follow his movement in the sky and I think he made peace much ahead of us because we saw that in one day he flew over Damascus, Jerusalem and Amman. Three main capitals in one day; it was amazing. When you fly high, you see no borders..." * * * At the Wild Animal Park, Donald Sterner, lead keeper for the California Condor Project, served as tour guide while Eshkar scrawled handwritten notes from right to left across a tablet. Sterner showed Eshkar a trailer in which a bank of closed-circuit televisions monitored every movement of the California Condors in their enclosures. Kristin McCaffree, a research fellow, and two volunteers from the Netherlands kept close watch on the screens for signs of mating behavior. It was a bit early in the season for mating, McCaffree said, but the birds were beginning to "display" -- an early stage in the courting ritual. From there, the zoological colleagues went into another trailer where there were three Petersine incubators. "We have to have the incubators set up for eggs running very dry, eggs running on the opposite side of the spectrum--very wet-- and for eggs in the middle," Steiner said. As a chick forms inside an egg, the egg loses weight--about 14 percent by the time the chick is ready to hatch. In the 55 days between the time the egg is laid and "pip" (the time when the chick can be heard making noises inside the egg), the egg is regularly weighed to see if its progress toward overall 14 percent weight loss is on schedule. "We look at what the theoretical weight should be," Steiner said. "If we start seeing a pattern with that egg, if it starts falling behind, then we can take water out. If it losing too much weight, then we add water. So we can make adjustments." Steiner's explanation of the process really were for my benefit, as the Israeli veterinarian already was quite familiar with these procedures. But there was some new information in his briefing for Eshkar as well, information that bore on the Griffin Vulture breeding program. To avoid weight loss problems in the eggs, Steiner told him, "what we do is leave the eggs with the parents, instead of pulling them fresh. We leave the eggs with the parents for two weeks, 10 to 14 days, then pull them and then we find we have a great deal of flexibility in controlling weight loss. "Somehow, they get things going by nature that we aren't able to do," Steiner said. "Then we have plenty of leeway to get them to lose the proper amount of weight." Activity in the incubation trailer becomes intense once pipping noises are heard in the egg. A speaker is mounted inside the incubators, and "we play vulture sounds to the chick to stimulate it," Steiner said, explaining condor sounds are not yet available. Additionally, keepers have rigged up a device to periodically make a tap, tap, tapping noise, "to stimulate the little guy to work out." The stimulation "gives them a will to come out of there; it gives them hope that mom or something is calling them out there. ...So we do that every couple of hours, what we call 'tape and tap.' In the interval hours, we observe the egg and monitor the activity of the chick, non-stimulated, to see how it is doing in there." A veterinarian's examination table in the incubator room drew Eshkar's interest. "If we have to break the chicks out, the vets are here but the keepers do the work," Steiner explained. "But the vets are there in case something happens like bleeding...or the yolk starts hanging out..." Next Steiner led Eshkar to another trailer, where newborn chicks can be kept in special isolettes. The cages are screened by thick black curtains, through which keepers may pass food without being seen. To place food in the cage, keepers put condor puppets on their hands--so that the chicks will learn to identify with their own kind. To drown out human sounds, "we have a c-d player that plays nature sounds," Steiner said. When the baby condors are more self-sufficient, they are moved to another facility where they are kept with other juvenile condors. For the first time they will be able to see other birds, but still won't be able to see their keepers. In the mid 1980s, there were only 22 California Condors throughout the world. Today, thanks to the project at the Wild Animal Park, there are 148 California Condors, 65 of them males, 70 females and 13 whose genders still are to be determined by DNA tests. Steiner next drove his jeep to a hill above the Wild Animal Park. Sitting together on a perch were two California Condors, one male, the other female, and both celebrities. "The male there is famous because he is the last California Condor to
be hatched from an egg taken in the wild and that was back in 1986," Steiner
said. "And the female is also very famous because she is the first California
condor to be conceived and hatched in captivity, totally captive produced,
back in 1988. That was a hatching the entire world heard about because
there had been a lot of doubters who said that California Condors would
not breed in captivity. Since then, we have had many more, and they had
their own now!"
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